Billie Holiday Research Paper

1)Billie Holiday Billie Holiday was born in Baltimore, Maryland on April 7, 1915 as Eleanora Fagan Gough to her father Clarence Holiday and mother Sadie Fagan. (Bush) There is controversy on where she was born and the year. Some say she was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the year of 1912. Her father was a teenage jazz guitarist and banjo player that played in the Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra. Her mother was a young teenager at the time as well and left her with uncaring relatives. Billie Holiday was sentenced to a catholic reform school at ten years old after she admitted to being raped. She was sentenced to stay until she became an adult, but she got out after two years through the help of a family friend. She then moved with her mother in 1927 to New Jersey and then Brooklyn. In New York, Holiday helped her mother with domestic work and then became working as a prostitute for additional income. Holiday got a dancing …show more content…
In 1935, she made her debut at the Apollo Theater. She entered the studio again during the last half of 1935 and recorded a total of four sessions. Even though the song quality was poor, they played songs such as “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”, “Twenty-Four Hours a Day”, and “If You Were Mine”. The combo playing made them popular on Columbia, Brunswick, and Vacalion. In Spring of 1937, Holiday started touring with Basie as a female complement to his make singer, Jimmy Rushing and lasted less than a year. She was fired from the band for being “temperamental and unreliable”. (Bush) Less than a month after leaving Basie, she got hired by Artie Shaw’s popular band and began singing with the group in 1938, one of the first black female appearances with a white group. She received support from the entire band but show promoters and radio sponsors began objecting to Holiday based on her unorthodox singing style and her

Show More